I've been playing electric guitar for 2 years now and I just can't play faster licks in solos. I'm not trying to play some out of the world solo, for example I can play first solo of Estranged, but there is no way I could play the second one. Is this a thing that just comes with playing, or should I just work on my speed (if yes, how to do it?)?

Just slow down the solo to a comfortable speed and play it over and over and over again for a week and you'll be able to do it. That's seriously all there is too it. Slow it down, play it 100% accurately and relaxed, and BLAM you can do it much faster. Rinse and repeat till it's up to speed.

Agree with above. I find that a comfortable speed is usually agonizingly slow, atleast for sweep picking and the like but it will help. I use a metronome because its harder (for me atleast) to keep time when playing extremely slow.

...or just torture the shit out of your fingers with technical exercises.
Try this pattern:
|--4-2---2---------------------------------------
|-------4---4-2-4-2---2-------------------------------------
|----------------------4---4-2-4-2---2-----------------------------------
|------------------------------------4----4-2-4-2---2-----------------------------
|----------------------------------------------------4---4-2-4-2---2----------------------
|-------------------------------------------------------------------4---4-2--------------------------
and then go backwards, over all frets you can play on, use different combinations of fingering, increase the distance between frets etc... Anything you can think of.

Depending on how many notes per string your playing, you'd start with an upstroke or a downstroke.

ex: ^That tab up there. You would start with a down stroke on the high E, then pick the second note with an up stroke. Then down stroke the one note on B string, then up on E, then repeat for the rest of it.

Some solos will be out of your reach to play. The most you can do is keep practicing and playing in general and attempt these solos from time to time.
I recall trying to play Tornado of Souls and I could not do it. I was like HOW ?!?!?! IMPOSSIBLELELE!>!1!"£%$

Only recently I picked it up again and learned it instantly and properly. Note by note. Slowly repeating the licks over and over.

__________________
On playing the Paul Gilbert signature at the guitar store extensively, my missus sighed:
"Put it down now, It's like you love that guitar more than me!"
In Which I replied.
"Well it has got two F-Holes!"

Some solos will be out of your reach to play. The most you can do is keep practicing and playing in general and attempt these solos from time to time.
I recall trying to play Tornado of Souls and I could not do it. I was like HOW ?!?!?! IMPOSSIBLELELE!>!1!"£%$

Only recently I picked it up again and learned it instantly and properly. Note by note. Slowly repeating the licks over and over.

this. you need to do exercises. i don't believe in the "play it slowly" thing, it only works if the particular lick you are learning involves techniques you already know. say you want to learn some alternate picking lick from paul gilbert: you can play it slow for as long as you want to, but you're never gonna get it right if you cant alternate pick a major scale at decent speeds.

this. you need to do exercises. i don't believe in the "play it slowly" thing, it only works if the particular lick you are learning involves techniques you already know. say you want to learn some alternate picking lick from paul gilbert: you can play it slow for as long as you want to, but you're never gonna get it right if you cant alternate pick a major scale at decent speeds.

I'm not sure if you've noticed the contradiction inherent to this.

How come learning things slowly will work for learning to play a scale but it won't work for a lick? Also, if you can learn a technique from applying it to a scale, why can you not learn the same thing from a lick?

You're right that if you can't alternate pick then you're not going to be able to learn an alternate picking lick but there is absolutely no reason why learning alternate picking in the form of a lick won't work while learning it from a scale or exercise will.

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R.I.P. My Signature. Lost to us in the great Signature Massacre of 2014.

well if your only goal is learning a song, well of course you can practise just the song.

if you are gonna act like a total ****** playing over and over just the one song you know it's gonna take forever to learn, you might as well let it rest for a while and practise systematically all the techniques involved in the particular solo you want to be able to play eventually.

i know nobody wants to learn things the hard way, but that's what it takes to be a good guitar player, instead of being just a kid that posts covers on youtube.

well if your only goal is learning a song, well of course you can practise just the song.

if you are gonna act like a total ****** playing over and over just the one song you know it's gonna take forever to learn, you might as well let it rest for a while and practise systematically all the techniques involved in the particular solo you want to be able to play eventually.

i know nobody wants to learn things the hard way, but that's what it takes to be a good guitar player, instead of being just a kid that posts covers on youtube.

You're acting like the systematic approach and learning through songs are somehow mutually exclusive and also that somehow learning songs prevents understanding...

There is nothing about learning licks and songs that stops you being systematic about it and learning things very deliberately with good technique and there is also nothing about learning through songs that means you won't understand what's going on.

You can learn just as well either way as long as you apply good practice and learn theory along side it, the real difference is that at the end of learning through other people's music you have something that you can play to other people.

Why would you learn something the hard way if you can do it just as well the easy way? And you really can learn the easy way.

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R.I.P. My Signature. Lost to us in the great Signature Massacre of 2014.

if the problem is you can't play a solo because it involves techniques you've never seen before, you better start with the basic exersises, because you wanna learn the technique, not the single lick. just learning one single song doesn't give you the whole spectrum of a technique (it might sometimes, but not all the time). this is, in my opinion, much more efficient in the long run. i never mentioned anything like "dont practise songs it's useless". well, it kinda is when you want to learn, say, hotel california, and you don't know hot to bend strings. that'd be just frustrating.

Yes it would but there's no reason you can't make yourself aware of a technique and it's applications by learning it from a song, at the very least there's nothing that makes that better than learning something from an exercise.

Either way in order to be able to do anything you have to be aware of the basic mechanics of doing something and just running an exercise isn't going to teach you that any more than a song will.

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R.I.P. My Signature. Lost to us in the great Signature Massacre of 2014.

No, I dislike agreeing with people who either are wrong or miss the point.

With a little thought and application all of those things are also true of songs; the same kind of application of thought you need to make them true of exercises as well. Only when you're done you end up with a song to play.

I'm 'bitching' because just telling someone to run exercises doesn't actually help, at all. What TS needs to do is practice anything but better. With the right kind of practice you can play more or less anything and develop your technique but if you apply it to songs you end up with context for what you're doing and a piece of music to play when you're done. Don't get me wrong, I advise exercises sometimes but only for very specific things; exercises should be used to solve problems and until you start playing you don't know what's going to get in your way.

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R.I.P. My Signature. Lost to us in the great Signature Massacre of 2014.

With a little thought and application all of those things are also true of songs; the same kind of application of thought you need to make them true of exercises as well.

i highly doubt that.

i'll never tell you that your method is wrong, because i have never tried it. it is, however, very non-standard. in fact, it's much different from what instructors usually teach, so, if i were you, i'd be very careful to say what you did in this thread, especially if your main intention is giving good pieces of advice.